By Gavin Ashenden
The words ‘God, nation and family’ seem to have become a trigger warning. These three words have conjured up columns of black-shirted and black-booted fascists marching into the heart of Europe to overthrow and destroy its democratic institutions.
The new Italian Prime Minister, who dared to describe herself as ‘a woman, Italian, mother and a Christian’, provoked the world-wide media into a fit of frenzied defensiveness against this ‘neo-fascist’ threat to democracy. While it’s a historical fact that the party Giorgia Meloni leads was founded by Mussolini, Italian politics are a little different to other countries, and she has constantly repudiated any connection with fascism in her public speeches.
That didn’t stop the mainstream media describing her as far-right, or neo-fascist. But then since the word fascist is flung at anyone who holds a political position that was thought of as normal and centrist from 1950-2010, that doesn’t help much. It’s just what the fully-woke call anyone they think is remotely sub-woke.
Context is everything, of course. So it’s useful to note that the threats to freedom of speech and democracy don’t come for the far-right, centre-right, near right, centre, or soft left… they are coming from the muscular, and militant left that is daily and weekly closing down the opponents who dare to question their narrative.
For example, Toby Young’s Free Speech Union was suddenly demonetised out of the blue recently by PayPal. The FSU’s only aim is to defend people who have been closed down or cancelled. Curiously the cancellation is always and only from the left.
Toby appealed to the public to cancel their PayPal accounts in protest against this political manipulation and threat to freedom of speech. He reached out to the British government to ask them to make international financial agencies more accountable for their actions. Suddenly PayPal backed down. They had never actually deigned to give a reason why they cancelled his organisation, so they just said it was a mistake, and backed off – this time.
As we move inexorably from a cash economy towards digital currency, even some coffee shop chains have started to accept cards only, and there is the growing sense of danger that cancellation can bring bankruptcy as well as social exclusion.
Does believing in God, nation and family make you a fascist?
Giorgia Meloni made her values clear in a range of public speeches. They have nothing to do with resurrecting Mussolini, black shirts, fascism or anti-semitism. Far from being antisemitic, when asked by a Jewish Newspaper about the accusations of fascism and her attitude to the Jews and Israel, she replied: ‘These are ridiculous accusations, coming from a desperate left without arguments. But I don’t want to dodge the question, we firmly condemn the loss of democracy, the outrageous anti-Jewish laws and the tragedy of World War II…Israel represents the only fully-fledged democracy in the broader Middle East and we defend without any reservations its right to exist and live in security.’ So no neo-fascism in any of that then.
But what she wanted was a defence against woke ideology.
She explained: ‘Why is the family an enemy? Because it is our identity… so they attack national identity, religious identity, gender identity, and family identity. Can’t I define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother?
‘No. I must be citizen x, gender x, parent 1, parent 2. I must be only a number.
‘Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. The perfect consumer.’
The danger comes more from PayPal than any nostalgia for Mussolini.
The older left v right issues no longer describe what is actually happening.
Andrew Doyle, the author of The New Puritans, claims the culture war is between those who believe in human and civil rights, free speech, scientific inquiry, the worth of the individual and the rule of law versus those who think there is no such thing as truth or objective reality, that speech is equivalent to violence and that we are all products of power and privilege revolving around group identity.
Doyle was an old-fashioned intellectual of the left, but no longer. If God, nation and family are not a ‘dog whistle’ for fascists, as Meloni’s critics have claimed, then maybe these three words are instead an antidote to this process of dehumanising us into numbers. Maybe they act to defend our humanity, our right to free speech and thought, and rescue us from being only numbers and consumers in a censorious state.
In our present context, belief in God is shorthand for asserting individuals have the dignity and freedom that comes from being children of a personal God.
Believing in family gives us the platform to confront the destabilising mess that the pandemic of absentee fatherhood inflicts on children, especially boys. Believing in the nation provides the glue of a shared cultural identity and geographical history. And any society needs glue to hold it together.
So the choice before us is either retaining a stable society with human rights, working laws, objective truth, and moral accountability; or, a dehumanising oppressive state where people are known only as victims or oppressors, and get cancelled by unaccountable woke financial agencies for not accepting the woke narrative.
We believe our value lies not in the group we belong to and what we consume, but in who we are, what we believe and what we become.
What’s the first step in this war to save our humanity and freedom?
Maybe to refuse to take fright when the media or campaign groups resort to intimidation and bullying and shriek out ‘fascist’ to terrorise anyone who disagrees with them. We are still free (just) to believe in God, the nation and family, and democratically argue for them.
